Alienware bumps the hard drive capacities of its Area-51 and Aurora notebooks …

Alienware's been paying a lot of attention to its storage options lately. Not too long ago, it began offering dual 64GB SSD drives, and today it has another announcement. Going along with its recent RAID theme, Alienware will begin offering its 17" Area-51 m9750 and Aurora m9700 notebooks with dual Samsung 320GB drives in either a RAID 0 or a RAID 1 configuration. The smaller, 15" Area-51 m5550, can also be configured with a single 320GB drive. The drawback is that the new 320GB drives spin at a slower 5,400rpm, as opposed to the previously offered 7,200rpm 200GB drive.

While configuring the Area-51 m9750, I found that upgrading from an 80GB single-drive configuration to a single 320GB drive set me back $300, but upgrading to a RAID 0 configuration with 2x320GB drives cost me $500, so at least there was about $100 in savings for the bump. Upgrading to a 64GB SSD and 320GB 5,400rpm drive from the original 80GB single drive set me back an additional $1,400. The RAID 1 configuration costs the same as buying both drives in a RAID 0 configuration, although your overall storage will report as just 320GB, since the drives are mirrored.

I know storage is important to gamers, specifically as game sizes continually increase, but I think if I were to own one of these lap monsters I'd prefer to focus on drive speed and just keep an external drive on the side. An external 320GB hard drive can be had for about a third of the price Alienware is selling the internal Samsung drives for.